Amazing Colleagues, Part Ia

I introduced you all to my colleague Aimee Nezhukumatathil awhile ago, so I'm sure you'll be pleased to find out how she turns close reading into an interdisciplinary art form in a brilliant response to Linda Pastan's poem "The Deathwatch Beetle" that ranges from Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" to entomology, from word choice and sound to bodies and spirits.

Bloggers and Gentlemen

Just a quick note to publicly acknowledge the utter awesomeness of Rob MacDougall and Marc Bousquet. Rob and his family drove much farther than I assumed they had to in order to meet the Constructivist clan at the Canadian Falls late this summer, while Marc put up with the perils of a skype-mediated conference call with my 11 students in Introduction to Graduate Studies in English yesterday afternoon (his time) in order to answer our questions on his book How the University Works.

We actually pushed the call with Marc back an hour later than planned because I had given my students the option of witnessing/documenting the largest campus/community protest I've ever heard of at my university--actually, an impromptu counter-protest, complete with speeches, musical performances, and skits against an anti-gay nutjob individual with full free speech rights whose point of view the more-than-2,000 people over the course of the afternoon respectfully but firmly declined to assent to--and three-quarters of tbe class took me up on my offer of extra credit to respond to it on our ANGEL discussion forum and perhaps more publicly. I'd like to think our campus made one transplanted western NYer proud. And I'm hoping at least some of my students make good use of the temporary privileges of Citizen SE authorship I've extended them. Stay tuned!

For those clickers from Inside Higher Ed checking out the obscurest blog on teh internets for the first time, please do pay a visit to Rob's and Marc's sites. Their writing, their voices, their scholarship, and their generosity make the academo-critical blogdustrial complex a better virtual space.

What Department Listservs Are For

I know, Scott is great at explaining how not to use 'em. But how about some examples of best practices?

Like one colleague of mine linking to this. Which provokes this:

Rocket ships
Are exciting
But so are roses
On a birthday

Computers are exciting
But so is a sunset

And logic
Will never replace
Love

Sometimes I wonder
Where I belong
In the future
Or
In the past

I guess I'm just
An old-fashioned
Space-man.

And this. And that.

If you can top this exchange (or simply name the poet I quoted), I'd see that we hired you in a heartbeat. If it weren't for that pesky $4.2M shortfall and hiring freeze we're muddling through right now....

Anyway, do leave a link or report on a good exchange on your department listserv. Berube shouldn't get all the best commenters.

The Bills Are 4-0 and Other Improbabilities

Just surfacing for a moment to note that the novel I'm teaching for the next two weeks in one of my classes--Patricia Grace's Potiki--is highly relevant for thinking through the political situatedness of the PGA event going on 15 minutes from my hometown at the Turning Stone resort complex this week. I did not plan this, but it's pretty neat.

[Update 1 (1:46 pm): Speaking of 1992....]

The Kind of Search Engine We Really Need

The Full Metal Archivist was just trying to recommend a book on writing about literature for my students in my Introduction to the English Major course: a thin book with a pale green cover and a kind of polka-dot-like leafy pattern surrounding a title in a cream-colored square by a female critic that's now out of print which she borrowed from me about 5 years ago and hasn't seen since. It describes the elements of poetry, drama, and fiction, includes a glossary of key terms, and uses such examples as Chopin's The Awakening and James Joyce's Dubliners to flesh out its concepts. That means it's not John Ciardi's How a Poem Means.

When she has a chance, she's going to dig through her notebooks from that time (which means a trip to our attic) to try to figure out the title and author. But why do we have to rely on such easily-forgettable information when searching for a book on-line? Assuming the google gods aren't regularly checking in on the obscurest blog on the internets, I'm leaving it to my most loyal remaining readers to identify this test before she does!

Go, Jenn!

Jenn Stuczynski is a Fredonia H.S. grad, college basketball standout, and world-class pole vaulter who's competing in Beijing next week. Going by past results, she'll need something of a miracle to get the gold, but don't put anything past her.

I first heard about Jenn a few months ago from onechan and imoto's day care provider, who was wondering about her chances of making it on the LPGA after her pole vaulting career is over. (Yes, Jenn loves golf.) I was skeptical then and I remain so now, but more on that later (and elsewhere). The key thing is, Fredonia is going nuts about our very own Olympian. Onechan entertains herself as we drive through town by saying "Jenn" every time she sees one of the yard signs Fredonians have been buying up in droves to help her parents afford the trip to China, which makes driving through town rather less than entertaining for the Full Metal Archivist and me, but is a small price to pay in the greater scheme of things.

Since we still don't have cable, we'll be relying on YouTube for video of Jenn's Olympic performances. Send her some good vibes the next few days, will you?

[Update 1 (8/20/08, 3:52 am): Well, she got the silver. Seeing as how her Russian rival broke her own Olympic and then world record after Jenn couldn't clear 4.90 m, that's a pretty great result!]

[Update 2 (8/22/08, 4:04 pm): Fredonia's own Dan Steinberg, of the Washington Post's DC Sports Bog fame, devotes two posts to Jenn in his Chinese Sports Smog.]

On That Day in Golf History: The Ward Wettlaufer Story

A story from golf history with Hamilton College and western NY angles? How could I not take the opportunity to pass it along to my colleagues? While I'm trying to educate academia's golfy philistines, I'd better link as well to some of my somewhat more analytical golf writing thus far this summer....